The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries, Volume I)

by D. L. Kung

  It took an hour and ten minutes and one stop for gas to reach the outskirts of East Peony Hill. Claire saw nothing more than a hamlet—a few mud-brick cottages along the verge of a dirt road, a couple of crude shop fronts lit by nude bulbs dangling from wires, and finally a long wall that separated the old village from miles of dark rice paddies.

  Albert stopped the car, turned the music down and looked at her in triumph.

  ‘Hey! So! Now I get my $3,000!’ He grabbed the money and stuffed it into his jeans pockets. ‘That was easy and you are lousy gambler, I tell you again! Maybe you bet someone else you wanted to get this far without being stopped by police or something? They always want to know what guay lo’s doing in the countryside. Anyway, in Guangdong nobody cares about tourists.’

  ‘Keep the money. But I want you to drive a little more, say, another twenty minutes up this road.’

  Albert shrugged. ‘How come? Nothing around here. Sure, why not? We’ve got time. But no more villages up there until those hills—see those lights? And then you’re in another county. Anyway, it’s too dark to see anything.’

  ‘I don’t care. Just humor me, Albert. Keep driving.’

  ‘Ha! Maybe you’re like ancient Chinese poet? You want to drown in a river gazing at the moon! But you don’t have any wine! So you’re a lousy poet and a lousy gambler, maybe! Crazy guay po. You meng cha-cha, craaaazzzy, lady. But I got my money, wah!’

  Another fifteen minutes down the narrowing road, Albert braked.

  ‘OK, we stop here,’ he said sullenly. He shifted the car into reverse.

  ‘Why, Albert? Keep going.’

  ‘No way. The road ends here,’ he said, pointing out a small sign obscured by overgrown bush.

  ‘That’s not what the sign says.’

  ‘You don’t believe me? I read Chinese! It says end of road. Hasta la vista, baby!’

  ‘I know what it says, Albert. I read Chinese too. It says we’ve reached Cha Ling.’

  Claire couldn’t calm her voice. They’d found it—the beginning, not the end—of her search. She couldn’t let Albert turn the car around. There might be miles to go before they reached the camp’s true perimeter. The road was pitch dark.

  ‘Anyway, gambling finished. We go back to Punyu. Your friend Joop waiting for me. You chi hsin-ah. Your wires in the head crossed up.’

  Albert’s mood had changed for good.

  ‘Albert, I’m sorry to drag you up here without telling you why. But I have friends at that farm I have to pick up.’

  ‘Chinese friends? No way! Not that farm. Big mistake. Not this place.’ Albert revved up the engine to start back the way they’d come.

  Claire knew Albert had to drive her all the way up to the gate, the only way to avoid wasting valuable hours walking blindly in the dark.

  ‘Okay, okay, Albert. Five hundred more.’

  ‘Did you see that sign?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything any more. It’s just a farm now—’

  Albert stopped the engine. His expression changed.

  Claire read the canny look in his eyes with satisfaction. She had found her scoundrel.

  ‘Thousand more.’

  She fished out a thousand kuay and handed it him. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Four thousand five hundred.’

  ‘Fine. Four thousand five hundred.’ She pulled the extra money out of her wallet and slapped it onto the dashboard.’ But Albert had seen yet more cash in her wallet.

  ‘Five thousand.’ The jovial Albert had disappeared.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No, too dangerous. Take your money back.’ He started the engine again and scraped the fender on the thick brush as he did a three-point turn. In seconds, Cha Ling was receding behind them.

  Claire reached into her bag and pulled out the Red Star. She placed its muzzle on his greasy temple.

  ‘Turn the car around!’

  He slammed on the brakes. His hands starting shaking and a wild look of recognition sprang into his eyes. The safety catch was still on, but how would Albert know that in the dark?

  ‘You one of those crazy people like in San Francisco Streets? People always shooting guns on TV!’

  ‘So you know how it goes, Albert. You want to stay one of the good guys? I won’t shoot you if you do what I say. This is a Chinese gun. No one knows I have it. When they find you on the road, shot with a Chinese gun by your own hand, outside a lao gai dui, so what?’

  Claire used the correct Chinese term for a reform-through-labor camp. When he heard Claire’s Chinese, Albert was no longer in doubt; his passenger had known their destination all along. Punyu’s small-time trucking magnate knew he had fallen in way over his head.

  He switched into Cantonese, a businesslike yelp that might have come from a soldier.

  ‘Ho-ah.’ His survival instinct rose to the challenge; he wanted his five thousand dollars safe from the greedy local cops. Claire watched him think fast how to get away from the lousy joss, the bad luck that threw him in her path tonight.

  In grim silence, Albert put the car back into gear and headed past the painted road sign and deeper into the blackness.

  After another ten minutes, they reached a crossroads marking a corner of the camp. Two stringy-looking pieces of barbed wire, a small white stone bridge, and a six-foot-high whitewashed road sign with red letters pointed to the left.

  ‘Drive right,’ Claire ordered. A back entrance for deliveries was a better bet than the front gate.

  Slowly, a stand of trees and two separate complexes— a sort of a walled town and about five hundred yards further—a compound of barracks emerged out of the dark. The old town must be the prison proper with the barracks originally built for the forced-job placement assignees, ex-prisoners who had served their time but been cruelly ordered by the Party to continue working for the rest of their lives as ‘free labor’ annexed to the same prison factory for meager wages.

  Albert’s hands had stopped shaking when he realized she probably wouldn’t shoot him as long as he kept driving. He braked the car about fifty yards away from another small bridge.

  ‘OK. So now?’

  Claire grabbed her backpack and opened the door. She heard nothing outside but was grateful anyway that Albert hadn’t simply driven to the gate to turn her in. Money meant more than ma fann hassle to his kind. She hunkered down and made her way toward the camp on foot.

  About a hundred yards along the road, three men in worn, baggy uniforms sat at a small table in the cold, one of them singing a slow love ballad off-key. Above them was a sentry tower, but whether it was manned or the tower guard had descended and was one of vocalists at the gate was unclear. Claire feared the barbed wire was electrified, but there was no way of knowing how tight MacGinnes kept security. She reckoned the camp was at least a half-mile wide. The compound alone could house hundreds of workers, while the occupants of the actual prison could only be guessed at.

  And it all belonged to an American with crisp cuffs.

  She snuck back to the car and whispered to Albert.

  ‘You’ve got your money, so be good to yourself and drive away without saying anything. You know if you report me, you’re the one who’ll be in big trouble. I’ll tell them you robbed me of all that cash and tried to dump me here. I’ll say the gun is yours. Believe me, Albert, because they will, no matter how much they distrust guay los.’

  Albert nodded, but he was shaking so hard, it seemed he couldn’t move. He just sat, staring ahead at the distant bridge.

  There wasn’t time to budge an Albert falling into a terrified trance. Claire inched her way down a gully on the side of the road, well away from the guards’ view. A drainage ditch lined the wire fence that was deep enough to obscure her approach, but in any case, the moon was new. She had to bend over to feel the way, muddy with rainwater. Her shoes filled with sucking muck.

  If MacGinnes ran a tight shop, anyone crawling his way out of the camp could be shot on sight. She’d read such stories over the years in huma
n rights reports and accounts of Hong Kong returnees from incarceration. On the other hand, she might be taken in the dark for an animal trying to get in, rather than out. No rural kid, even in uniform, would be so wasteful as to shoot a valuable farm animal.

  She searched the fence, again and again, but couldn’t find any opening in the wire or chance of a safe entry.

  How long had she been hiking bent over? Fifteen minutes or thirty? In one short week, she had found herself in a nightmare, and nightmares showed no respect for earthly time. There was no controlling nightmares. She thought of Mrs Chao breaking down with fear, of Vic’s mother writing to her son, ‘You’re a star with us,’ and then hearing from the New York desk that he was missing—two innocent mothers living in nightmares twenty-four hours a day.

  Nightmares led and you just followed, along a muddy ravine and around a soppy perimeter of death. Her ankles ached from pulling at the disgusting ooze.

  She spotted a shed just ahead of her, outside the fence Stumbling and crawling out of the ditch, she tested the door. The latch was rusty, but it didn’t take much muscle to release it. There were no windows, so once inside she risked using the flashlight for a second, then switched it off. There were simple farm tools made of wood, enough for a road gang of more than half a dozen men. She carried two long shovels back to the fence and searched for some kind of large brick or boulder. Finally, yards away from the shed, she found a small sandbag. It was hard to tell in the dark. Maybe it had been used as a weight of some kind, maybe it held concrete mix.

  Carefully avoiding touching the metal end of the shovel on the wire, she laid the wooden handle gingerly on the lower wire, pulling it down as far as it would stretch. There was no way of knowing whether she had set off an alarm or not, so she had to move quickly.

  She jammed the other shovel down onto the sandbag as a pivot to hold the upper wire higher and laid as many rocks as she could on the lower end to hold it up. She was wearing rubber-soled shoes, but she couldn’t be sure if the wire was set to shock or kill. Praying silently, she positioned herself over the widened opening between the two wires, then placed one leg on the other side. She bent over double, and found herself humming a jittery version of ‘Limbo Rock’ as she balanced herself to bring the other leg through the opening as fast and cleanly as possible. Her toe struck the fence and her heart stopped. Electricity shot through her. She rolled onto the ground.

  She was okay. She’d hit a wooden post, not the wire. The electricity she’d felt was merely one hundred volts of pure terror.

  She figured it might take the guards ten to twenty minutes to find the shovels if they walked the perimeter in the right direction but they’d move faster than she did, not skulking along the bottom of the gully. She started trotting toward the compound, her shoes making squishy thuds in the earth, pounded-down and naked of any vegetation. God knows how many deadened souls had walked these square yards back and forth year after year.

  She reached a small, one-story structure, simply one room open on two ends to the fields. There was no real door, but an archway that led into an unlit space filled with large tubs and hand-pulled wagons piled with dirty clothes. The smell of chemicals and sweat hit her nostrils from the interiors as she moved cautiously along the arch and waited for her sight to adjust. Suddenly, somewhere ahead of her she heard two male voices, softly talking beyond the far wall of the building.

  She crept down behind one of the wagons. Her face brushed the worn cotton and plastic buttons of a shirt. She froze for a second until she realized the shirt was empty. She was in the camp laundry. A blackboard on the wall behind her caught the light of some buildings beyond. It was covered in numbers and characters that seemed to be a tally of the washing, but was headed by more permanently, elaborately written large characters stating, ‘Increase Production, Reform Thought, Oppose Anti-Socialist, Anti-Party Counterrevolutionaries.’

  ‘Definitely the company slogan back in Woodland Hills,’ she thought as she crouched in the shadow of the laundry wagon. Steps approached the open archway. A beam of light played across the stained cement floor. Claire froze, half-covered by overhanging pieces of thin gray clothing threatening to tumble down the side of the laundry pile. The flashlight tracked across the knees of her cotton slacks but didn’t stop, and she sighed a prayer of thanks it hadn’t caught the tops of her running shoes. The footsteps started off again, this time in the direction of the fence.

  That gave her time to inch back out of the building on the other side where a parallel arch opened onto a line of buildings in front of her, and another row of buildings led left in the direction of the old prison. Dotted in the distance were long barracks, uniform in length, lined with small low windows, all dark. But they were occupied, she realized, when she saw a cigarette lighter flick on and off.

  She guessed they were the dormitories. If Cha Ling was a camp for men, she wouldn’t find Cecilia housed with the others. More likely she was kept somewhere inside the old prison walls, or in one of the buildings kept for other purposes. On the other hand, Vic could be anywhere.

  Claire kept going, hugging the wall of a rough theater with a stage and piles of folded chairs lining the walls. She didn’t dare use her flashlight. A well-trod path took her next to an enormous building full of tables, a rough canteen large enough to accommodate hundreds of people. Claire crouched down again and looked across at the barracks from the partial cover of one shrub. No lights were burning, but that was probably normal in an institution where rising at night was a punishable offense. At dawn, the compound would come alive again and start work at six. She was running out of time.

  A slight rustling sound nearby turned Claire’s back rigid. She squatted harder against the wall behind the shrub. The sound stopped, then started again. Claire waited for a touch, a light or a voice. There was nothing. She sat dead still. Her breath sounded like loud wheezing to her own ears. She tried to be patient, to let things die down a little.

  The rustling started again, more confidently. Claire watched, transfixed by fear into one shallow breath as the thin line of a viper passed three inches in front of the toe of her left shoe.

  The faint roar of a car engine starting up in the distance broke the humid stillness. It sounded hundreds of feet away in the direction of the rear gate.

  So long, Albert.

  At least his engine might distract the guards’ attention from her own moves. She was rewarded by the sound of hurried padding feet; the guards ran past the laundry building and down the other side of the dining and viewing halls back toward the road.

  Her breathing was turning into panicked panting. She forced down a few deep gulps of air. There were more outbuildings to search. After that she was at a loss. The prison walls loomed over her about five hundred feet away. She reckoned they were approximately twenty feet high and topped by another electric fence stretched tautly and marked with lights at an interval of six feet or so.

  Was MacGinnes running an operation entirely of ‘forced job placement’ workers? Or did the inner compound still house active prisoners requiring high-security surveillance?

  Claire inched past an older, rough-tiled empty warehouse and made out a row of water faucets lining a long trough—some kind of communal bath or washroom.

  A larger, whitewashed brick building lay ahead, beyond which the barracks stood in pregnant, sleeping silence. Someone had circled the doorway with a bed of sickly-looking red flowers. There was an empty bicycle rack just to the right of the main door.

  Claire heard shouts coming from the direction of the fence where she’d broken in. The guards had discovered the shovels. Time had run out and there was no retreat. She abandoned a lingering hope she could exit by the same spot.

  With a wet chill running up her spine, she realized she’d stepped into a trap. She was stuck here and she was number three.

  First Vic, then Cecilia, and now the big brave boss. End of the line.

  She tried one of the windows to the left of the door next to he
r. It was tightly locked; the row of bottles like crystal sentries on the other side of the glass told her it was the compound’s clinic.

  She couldn’t risk moving even a foot away from the wall or crossing back to the laundry. Flashlight beams swept the open ground she’d just crossed between the fence and the laundry. Voices called to each other. There were at least three guards looking for her, but the shouts may have been a call for reinforcements. She crept along the long wall of the clinic, watching for the emergence of any figures in the dark. She tested each of the windows. All were tightly latched and screened against insects. She went back to the entrance, all the time watching the flickering lights of guards in the distance, and picked up one of the heavy stone pots from which a flower wagged listlessly. Heaving it against the wooden latch of the narrow window, she gasped at the sound of a crack in the glass and the splintering of thin wood. The window gave way. Pieces of glass tinkled into the crevice, held in only by the screen on the other side.

  She waited. Had they caught the noise?

  The opening was enough for Claire to reach between the shards of jutting glass to the middle of the three panes and unhook the window frame and screen. She hoisted herself onto the sill and dropped to the floor inside. She landed next to a small wooden desk with cheap notebooks piled on one corner. A old telephone stood, clumsy and black, next to a covered tea mug. A thermos for water, stood next to it, its metal top missing and the cork plug as worn as the flower decoration that had been chipped away.

  She closed the window and fell into a squat. The building looked rustic enough on the outside, but one half of the space looked like an operating theater.

  She made out a surgical table, a powerful ceiling lamp, and a set of oxygen tanks—the works.

  She made out the sound of something alive, somewhere across the room. Another snake? A rat?

  She counted out a full five minutes, relying on her watch to replace the patience she couldn’t muster from the straightjacket of fear that strangled her. Only once she knew five minutes had passed would she search for a better hiding place.